Liberals’ media bailout puts foxes in charge of the chickens

Chris Selley

If the heritage minister had explicitly set out to bolster the notion that Canadian media are bought and paid for by the Liberals, he could have done no better

It is difficult to know where to begin to deplore the process by which the federal government will decide which media organizations to subsidize and which not to. So let’s start with Unifor’s involvement.

“Unifor?” you may ask. “The flamboyantly anti-Conservative labour union?”

Indeed. The mega-union representing 315,000 workers across the country, including a large percentage of anglophone Canadian journalists at legacy media outlets — and also autoworkers, because that totally makes sense — will nominate one of eight people to an “independent panel of experts.” The panel will decide the criteria for divvying up tax breaks adding up to some $600 million in public funding.

It is questionable of the government to ask any journalists’ union to weigh in on this — the Féderation nationale des communications (FNC), which counts many francophone journalists among its members, also gets a vote. After all, the idea here is supposed to be to help media organizations adapt to new market conditions, and these unions represent people who have every interest in riding dying business models to retirement.

But Unifor is the union that turned nakedly partisan during the 2015 election campaign, fundinglie-filled attack ads against Stephen Harper’s Conservatives and mortifying many journalist members whose credibility depends on their perceived political independence. More recently, Unifor’s executives have collectively styled themselves “Andrew Scheer’s worst nightmare,” eliciting more futile pleas from journalists to shut up.

Unifor’s National Executive Board started planning for the federal election today @AndrewScheer #canlab #canpoli pic.twitter.com/s10D4r8Zv7
— Unifor Canada (@UniforTheUnion) November 14, 2018

Well, those were the days. Now the government that benefited from Unifor’s partisan largesse has asked it for help deciding who’s a proper journalist and what’s a proper news outlet, and thus worthy of government largesse! If Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez had explicitly set out to bolster the notion that Canadian media are bought and paid for by the Liberal Party of Canada, he could have done no better.

full story at https://nationalpost.com/opinion/chris-selley-liberals-media-bailout-puts-foxes-in-charge-of-the-chickens